This article conceptualizes "possibilities" as a challenge to the ways that Black boys are constructed and arrested through their engagement in educational spaces. Critical race scholars have deployed counter-stories to disrupt deficit framing of Black boys by discussing their possibilities, promise, and potential. Similarly, we weave…

Guidance for schools now includes policy to address sexual harassment and statutory requirements to deliver relationships and sex education, yet recent evidence shows that sexual harassment, in schools and online, remains a pernicious problem. Why does educating for gender equality feel like resistance, and what are educators actually resisting?…

Educators continue to struggle with how masculinities are performed and regulated in spaces of learning. In a time of rapid social change, there is a renewed impetus for gender justice reform in schooling, though these approaches themselves remain a shifting picture. Adding a new layer of complexity, we are now witness to educational policy…

Internationally, boys from working-class backgrounds are often the most likely to disengage from their formal education. Research on the educational experience of working-class boys has focused heavily on their identity barriers, often positioning these young men as either vulnerable or volatile in their formal education. Social theorists have…

This article examines everyday disciplinary practices in three kindergarten classrooms and their role in identity construction. Taking a "figured worlds" perspective, I show how racialized and ableist discourses mediated processes of surveillance, escalation, and physical restraint, leading educators to disproportionately position Black…

The contemporary #MeToo moment has led to renewed concern about issues of masculinity and gender justice. This moment provides a strong warrant for critically analyzing different programmes for boys and men in relation to their capacity for gender transformation. This paper presents three such programmes located in Victoria (Australia) as case…

This paper is a making, a cartography that maps gender equity policy in Australian education. I suggest that entrenched reductive sexist, racist, homo/transphobic and misogynistic practices have not significantly shifted materially since the implementation of inaugural gender equity programs in the 1970s, despite the investment of much money,…

This article explores the representation of the figure of the effeminate boy in two contemporary adolescent novels written in Chinese which break the silence in addressing alternative gender and sexual identities. In "A Beautiful Heart," the transsexual and homosexual tendencies evinced by an effeminate boy are treated as forms of sexual…

Research grant funding influences the organisation of academic work and academic careers. We problematise general approaches to gender bias in research grant funding and argue that it fails to include the wider structures of inequality and the unequal gendered power relations in academia. Approaching the subject with gender budgeting we challenge…

This conceptual paper addresses the nature of white male privilege within school administration and how that privilege, through an examination and clarification of equity as justice, can be checked, interrogated and possibly moderated by a reflection on the spiritual nature of leading for democratic change.

Extensive feminist critique of lad culture has raised serious concerns about its role in the sexualisation and objectification of women; its association with 'pack-like' boisterous behaviour and pressured heavy drinking of alcohol; and its use of banter, irony and infantile humour to provide a protective shield for sexist and homophobic practices.…

In this essay, I offer relationship-building as central to teaching and learning in early-childhood contexts. With a distinct focus on historically marginalized students in United States education, particularly Black boys during childhood, I draw on personal experiences and my own position as teacher-researcher to center Black boys' humanity and…

The articles in this themed issue explore global educational experiences that embrace various cultures, traditions, religions and identities. Collectively this work offers valuable insights into unexplored areas of research, illuminating issues that intersect across race, ethnicity and gender. The significance of these studies lies in the…

This paper discusses symbolic violence in sociolinguistic research on multilingualism. It revisits an archived recording of a group discussion between four boys about their chances of having sex with a female researcher. The data is rife with symbolic violence. Most obviously, the conversation enacted a heterosexist form of symbolic violence. This…

A social justice analysis of the circumstances of African-American boys and young men (AAB) reveals a pervasive pattern of negative stereotypes, disparate treatment, and resource deprivation that augur poorly for their development. Developmental science has yielded many insights about the deleterious sequelae of racism and economic disadvantage,…